The use of the term “illegal” (instead of “undocumented”) represents the way that government policy and the media work together to foster prejudice and cruelty.
The term “illegal immigrant” is vitriolic and defamatory, but it’s also simply incorrect: Jose Antonio Vargas emphasizes that, while entering the U.S. without the proper documentation is illegal, being in the U.S. without those documents isn’t a crime. In fact, most undocumented people living in the U.S. did enter the country legally (and just overstayed a visa). Meanwhile, undocumented immigrants also commit crimes at lower rates than the rest of the U.S. population. Thus, calling undocumented people “illegal” is misleading—it primarily serves to paint them as criminal outsider “others” who pose a threat to Americans’ security and wellbeing
However, the term “illegal” was long dominant in newspapers, magazines, and TV news, which shows how the media has—intentionally or otherwise—reinforced the same prejudices that lead to discrimination and anti-immigrant policies. Moreover, the term “illegal” also reflects the way that, while government policy determines which migration is legal and illegal, the public generally puts the blame on migrants themselves. Vargas notes that there was no “illegal immigration” before the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act created limits on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, and undocumented immigrants have only widely been viewed as “illegal” since the 1990s (and especially since the 9/11 attacks). The Clinton and Bush administrations explicitly treated immigration as a security issue, which has encouraged Americans to view immigrants as akin to trespassers, invaders, or even terrorists. Later, this became Donald Trump’s primary way of framing the immigration debate. But, according to Vargas, it has nothing to do with how undocumented immigrants behave and everything to do with the way the government treats them.
“Illegal” Immigration Quotes in Dear America
This is not a book about the politics of immigration. This book—at its core—is not about immigration at all. This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like me find ourselves in. This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together and having to make new ones when you can’t. This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves. This book is about what it means to not have a home.
After twenty-five years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom.
There are many parts that make each of us whole. Since I didn’t know who to talk to, or what to do, or how to think about the “illegal” part of me, embracing the gay part kept me alive. If I had not accepted it as early as I did, I don’t know where I would be.
Ragtime connected dots I didn’t know existed, allowing me to better understand American history in ways my textbooks didn’t fully explain. I would learn that except for Native Americans, whose tribes were already here before the colonists and the Pilgrims landed, and African Americans, who were uprooted from their homes and imported to this country as slaves, everyone was an immigrant. I didn’t know what legal papers they had, or if they needed them, or if they were considered “illegals,” too, but white people were immigrants, like my family are immigrants.
I didn’t realize it then, but the more stories I reported on, the more people I interviewed, the more I realized that writing was the freest thing I could do, unencumbered by borders and legal documents and largely dependent on my skills and talent. Reporting, interviewing, and writing felt like the safest, surest place in my everyday reality. If I was not considered an American because I didn’t have the right papers, then practicing journalism—writing in English, interviewing Americans, making sense of the people and places around me—was my way of writing myself into America. In the beginning, writing was only a way of passing as an American. I never expected it to be an identity. Above all else, I write to exist, to make myself visible.
To pass as an American, I always had to question the law. Not just break it, not just circumvent it, but question it. I had to interrogate how laws are created, how illegality must be seen through the prism of who is defining what is legal for whom. I had to realize that throughout American history, legality has forever been a construct of power.
A longtime journalist who edited immigration for a regional news outlet told me: “Even when we report facts about undocumented immigrants, the readers either don’t care or don’t want to believe it. That’s how successful the right-wing sites have been.”
The overall result?
Immigrants are seen as mere labor, our physical bodies judged by perceptions of what we contribute, or what we take. Our existence is as broadly criminalized as it is commodified. I don’t how many times I’ve explained to a fellow journalist that even though it is an illegal act to enter the country without documents, it is not illegal for a person to be in the country without documents. That is a clear and crucial distinction. I am not a criminal. This is not a crime.
“Illegal” Immigration Symbol Timeline in Dear America
